Sentara Health scales its use of Awhing’s AI after powerful ROI and clinician adoption
After three years of successful driving, Sentara Health recently expanded its use of Aig Ai-Power chart review and discharge summary tools in all 12 hospitals in Virginia and North Carolina.
When Sentara and Reat Rews started working together, the focus was on how to improve clinicians’ comprehensive chart reviews, said Joseph Evans, chief health information officer at Sentara. The goal is to improve diagnostic specificity and ensure more accurate capture of clinical complexity, he explained.
Subsequently, the Chatgpt-style feature was quickly introduced, which sums up discharge notes and clinical history, saving staff time and reducing their cognitive burden. Similar to environmental scribes, Evans notes, the tool allows clinicians to become “editors, not authors.”
Respectful technology uses AI to automatically review structured and unstructured data in a patient’s clinical map. It quickly demonstrates relevant diagnostics and missed documentation opportunities and summarizes important clinical information. This not only helps clinicians understand the patient’s medical history from the outset, but also helps them identify potential safety issues, Evans said.
“Early, we had several major safety wins – surrounded by sepsis, people who don't use antibiotics, should be prevented because that's not the ones with sepsis.”
Evans said these patient safety stories won the clinician’s victory and helped Sentara jump from pilot to adoption.
He noted that while the project was initially started with 10-user pilots at just three sites, Awhing's technology quickly attracted attention, and clinicians on other Sentara sites were quick to ask when they could use the tool.
He also said that the implementation process of the technology is very simple.
“As our volunteer, I deployed a lot of things, including two epic upgrades a year,” Evans declared. “This is one of the easiest implementations I’ve ever done in my role.”
Currently, clinicians adopt the tool in the range of 65-75% – the results Evans calls it “incredible.” In his view, this is mainly due to the tool’s ability to raise potential safety issues and improve patient outcomes rather than just financial or administrative benefits.
However, the economic benefits are there. Evans says that based on the Sentara website you are looking at and how many clinicians are using the tool on the site, International has a ROI to two to four times the cost of a tool. This ROI comes primarily from better coding and documentation.
Still, he insists that the key to adopting AI is not just efficiency or ROI—it wins the trust of clinicians by demonstrating the positive impact of the real world on patient safety and quality of care.
Photo: natali_mis, Getty Images
